[WikiEN-l] Alphascript Publishing: 1900+ copy&pasted books fromWikipedia

[Jay Litwyn]

I think this message is better directed at Amazon and other distributors. 
Nothing is inherently wrong with mirroring Wikipedia on paper. And, I think 
that belies some of the difficulties in selecting articles, doing a real 
copy edit (that is manually re-typing it to make it flow, among other 
things, and I am not sure that they do that), and formatting it for paper. 
Some might think that paper is a wasteful business, and to read those who 
want to bill me electronically, it is. You must understand, though, that I 
doubt it is the intention of AlphaScript publishing to dishonour us, and 
really, their selection of us is an honour. To my knowledge, all that is 
required to meet a -BY- requirement is one mention of all contributors. I 
think that is part of how we managed to pare wikipedia down to a DVD release 
for WalMart: I do not know--did not buy it. The total of all edits is over 
four terabytes, which would not fit (that is about a thousand DVDs). I would 
be interested in their tables of content. It would be nice to figure it into 
our own selection processes. And hey...are you sure they are not among our 
monetary contributors?